“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Looking over those nine-and-a-half months of sessions now, it’s fairly obvious what Seth was up to. He’d initially given us the material on Frameworks 1 and 2 in private sessions not long after starting Mass Events, as Rob explained in his notes for Session 814. Yet even though Seth also discussed those psychic frameworks to some degree in a dozen sessions for the book, still he finally took that break in dictation to ‘re-educate’ us, looking at our own previous beliefs and those of the world at large in the light of Frameworks 1 and 2.

(“In an important fashion those private sessions parallel his material for Mass Events … material that did make us view the world and current events quite differently than we had earlier. Several times we asked about local fatal accidents we read about, for instance, wondering how such events fit in Frameworks-1-and-2 activity. Some of those sessions were devoted to our private beliefs, but usually Seth put such beliefs into the larger social context. Four days after they took place, he began discussing the disastrous events at Jonestown, Guyana, involving the murder or suicide of more than 900 Americans in that South American settlement last November 18, 1978. Since then, we’ve voiced our hopes often that Seth will go into the entire Jonestown affair in Mass Events; he can’t but help be aware of our wishes! So interspersed in all of that private material are some excellent — and lively — discussions of events current in the world at that time, as well as discourses on connections between creativity and Framework 2, and topics as diverse as psychotic behavior and early civilizations. It was as though Seth were trying to help us break up old associations for once and for all. Certainly he tried his best, and any failings are on our parts.

(“We have our hassles like everyone else, of course. Seth ‘never promised us a rose garden,’ and we have our good days and our bad days as we encounter life’s daily challenges, joys, adventures, and misadventures. In this large group of sessions, Seth addressed himself to several of our individual problems: Rob’s occasional bouts of indisposition when he felt ‘under the weather’ generally, or was bothered by a variety of minor but annoying symptoms; and my own long-standing troubles with severe stiffness. If Seth didn’t give us a rose garden, he certainly did — and does — try to tell us where the weeds come from! This personal material did help give us a much larger perspective on our various challenges, and we’ve made some inroads in overcoming them. Like anyone else, we have to put Seth’s material to use for ourselves. The thing is, often we’re so busy getting the material and preparing it for publication that we don’t have the time to really study it as our readers do. Perhaps Seth was trying to compensate for that in those private sessions, by taking time out from dictation to help us put the material to greater personal use.”

(We held our first session for 1979 — a private one — on the evening of New Year’s Day. During it Seth remarked that he’d “begin book sessions again next Wednesday,” but that didn’t quite work out; he still had a few more nonbook sessions to go. Jane has been looking over his material on Mass Events every so often lately, though, with the idea of going back to work on it. And then, on the very night when she told me that she thought Seth would resume book dictation, Sue Watkins called with news that it was all official now: Today she’d signed her contract with Prentice-Hall for the publication of Conversations With Seth.)

Now: The beliefs of [Charles] Darwin and of [Sigmund] Freud³ alike have formed together to give you a different screen. Experience is accepted and perceived only as it is sieved through that screen. If Christendom saw man as blighted by original sin, Darwinian and Freudian views see him as part of a flawed species in which individual life rests precariously, ever at the beck and call of the species’ needs, and with survival as the prime goal — a survival, however, without meaning. The psyche’s grandeur is ignored, the individual’s sense of belonging with nature eroded, for it is at nature’s expense, it seems, that he must survive. One’s greatest dreams and worst fears alike become the result of glandular imbalance, or of neuroses from childhood traumas.

(9:59. Jane wasn’t too surprised that Seth had returned to his book, since before the session she’d thought he would. Yet, she’d been “a bit nervous, even if it is dumb or stupid: I still wonder if I can do it after a layoff. The stuff isn’t anything like I thought I’d get, though….” It seemed incredible to us now that the last book session had been held over nine months ago.

A person could neither be proud of personal achievement nor blamed for failure, since in large measure his characteristics, potentials, and lacks were seen as the result of chance, heredity, and of unconscious mechanisms over which he seemingly had little control. The devil went underground, figuratively speaking, so that many of his mischievous qualities and devious characteristics were assigned to the unconscious. Man was seen as divided against himself — a conscious figurehead, resting uneasily above the mighty haunches of unconscious beastliness. He believed himself to be programmed by his heredity and early environment, so that it seemed he must be forever unaware of his own true motives.⁴

Not only was he set against himself, but he saw himself as a part of an uncaring mechanistic universe, devoid of purpose, intent, and certainly a universe that cared not a whit for the individual, but only for the species. Indeed, a strange world.

(10:27. Seth came through with half a page of information for Jane — personal material that’s deleted here — then ended the session at 10:34 P.M. “I’m so unsure of myself it must be terrible,” Jane said as soon as she came out of trance. “I’m so glad he’s back on the book again. I keep asking: ‘Is it good, is it good?’ I know it is, but I’ve got that empty feeling again, because of the suspense….”)